Last December I published a post about an inspiring documentary featuring librarians In Northeastern Kenya who walk hundreds of miles with camels to deliver books to children. This year, along with part of that post below, I’m including ways you can help build African libraries.

In the US the African Library Project coordinates book drives here and partners with African schools and villages to start small libraries.

In Africa, some of the African Library Project’s partners include Peace Corps volunteers and school administrations.

Former Peace Corps members and others request books that are organized into libraries serving local African communities. One such Peace Corps volunteer was my sister-in-law Ginnie Humphreys who served in Lesotho about a decade ago.

Lesotho is a tiny inland African country surrounded by South Africa. Ginnie’s project, Friends of Lesotho, founded in 1986, is a partner with The African Library Project. Friends of Lesotho also provide scholarships to secondary school students. You can donate to this charity or others by using Amazon’s Smile link.

AmazonSmile donates a part of its profits from each sale to the charity of your choice. The price you pay is NOT affected, and you can change charities at any time you wish. The link to sign onto AmazonSmile is https://smile.amazon.com/

If you’ve heard Nobel Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai, speak out against violence against girls and seen news about the kidnapping and murder of young women in Africa seeking an education, know that these two projects, both of which include African girls and women are one way we can all fight back.

The Camel Librarians

A documentary film from Marco Polo Film AG, “The Caravan of Books” captures the amazing dedication of the camels and men who deliver the books in Kenya via the Mobile Camel Library.

This trip starts from the library in Garissa, a small city in Kenya which has about 30,000, mostly older books, in English and Swahili on its shelves.

Every couple of months some of the librarians pack two large wooden boxes with about 300 books, both fun and educational, and strap them onto the back of a camel to take into the semi-arid desert on a four hundred mile journey.

Prominent in the shot of the books in the first box is a copy of Heidi, a classic children’s book about a young Swiss girl sent to live with her grandfather in the Swiss alps where he is a bitter, reclusive man who raises goats.

Ask the film progresses it is soon apparent that the lives of children in the Kenya desert are quite similar to Heidi’s in the Alps. Included in the film are two young girls from a nomadic tribe who have never seen a school or a book before the caravan arrives at a school near them.

The caravan includes three young pack camels who are learning the trail for the first time. As they, their herders and the librarians walk through the streets of Nairobi they are quite skittish and balk at the idea of crossing a bridge over water. They all manage to get into the wilderness though and their four week journey begins.

The children

The bush children are needed to carry out the many chores their family has to do to survive in the wilderness. They gather firewood, a scarce material in the desert. Other children including a few girls do get to go to schools, some held outdoors and some inside barren buildings that contain few if no books. When the caravan stops at the first school, the librarians unpack a large tent and set it up. Then the carefully lay out the books one by lone on large blankets spread on the ground.

Only then are the children allowed out of the school. And that is a moving sight to see.

The children approach the books with the reverence with which you might see children approach a newborn baby animal. They cannot keep the books, so they sit or squat on the ground and read silently to themselves or softly to each other under the shade of the tent. Come evening the librarians pack up the camels and walk on to the next school.

The mobile camel library serves 4,000 readers a year, but 16,000 children in this area of Kenya are still without any books.

The camels

The film also features Nairobi writer and illustrator of children’s books, Alfred Muchilwa who went along with the caravan to capture the story for a new children’s books. The star of the book is the camel who carries the two wooden boxes. It’s name is “Gellow,” the Somali word for “camel.

In Arthur’s book, Gellow is frightened by a lion. He loses all the books and the letters of the alphabet inside them. Desperate, he asks for help from the children to find the letters and put them back into the books.

Gellow is a dromedary (one-hump) camel. Each day he and his three trainee camels walk 18 kilometers. It takes a camel four weeks to bring books to all the children, stopping mainly to eat leaves on trees along the way, take a dust bath to shake off ticks or take ten minutes at a water hole to fill up their humps.

When the camels return to Nairobi a vet cares for them. Thorns, ticks, and a slight fever requiring a shot are the price they pay for their trips. Usually they need to rest for the 10 days they get off between trips.

The book illustrator

He’s a key part of the film – he tells his story to the children while he draws them. Later, he shows us how an illustrated children’s book is made. In the end he’s rewarded in a way most writers are not – Alfred Muchilwa (shown here in the film) gets to take copies of his book out with the camels and see the children reading it.